I use XFCE, and the only GNOME based programs that I use are Evince and Gedit. So, I think it should not be a problem. I realized that the journal size was >3GB. I flushed it and reduced the vaccum size to 500MB and time to 7d. This reduced the boot time. However, I would also want to disable unnecessary services.
– WYSIWYGAug 2 '17 at 6:38

It's possible there will be issues with GDM, if you're using that to log in. I'm not sure.
– mattdmAug 2 '17 at 12:10

As a general rule, if something is DBus based (and accounts-daemon is), it's safe to turn off automatic startup of it, as it will just get started by DBus whenever something actually needs it.

For this particular case, the accounts-daemon is the executable component of the FD.O AccountsService, which handles non-priveleged listing of account information (because apparently using libc routines for this like you should is too hard for GNOME developers to do). It may or may not be used by the display manager (login screen), the screensaver, and the account management tools in your desktop environment. As mentioned above, DBus starts requested services on-demand, so this is something that you can definitely disable automatic startup of, but it probably will be started by other components of your system (especially if you're using GNOME or KDE for your desktop).

This is not because "using libc routines is too hard", but because using a dbus service allows separation of privileged activities.
– mattdmAug 1 '17 at 19:11

I'm talking about lookup of account information, not editing accounts. Even if you're using SELinux, most normal users have to have read access to at least /etc/passwd, and core software has to have read access to /etc/groups. Those therefore are not privileged operations, and thus don't require privilege separation. Similarly, outside of very paranoid configurations, access by regular users is functionally required for any centralized user database.
– Austin HemmelgarnAug 1 '17 at 19:44

Apps like Control Center are the main consumers. I think Shell and GDM use it to get user lists; this is something that's pretty low-level in glibc and makes sense to have in a library. *shrug*. I'm told the plan is to eventually replace it with SSSD but someone needs to do the work for that.
– mattdmAug 1 '17 at 20:07